I was doing some prop hunting with my art direction teacher this weekend. We visited an extremely run-down junk store. The quiet and almost toothless proprietor took us into a side room and showed us a box full of old cameras. Most of them were broken Polaroids, but down at the bottom was one of these little beauties.
The Olympus Pen-EE was first produced in 1961. It’s a half-frame camera, which means it shoots only half a frame of 35mm film at a time. The man at the junk store let me buy it for eight dollars. considering these types of models seem to be going for between fifty and a hundred dollars on ebay, I got a good deal!
The Pen-EE is one of the earlier automatic exposure cameras. When set on automatic it uses a selenium meter placed in a honeycomb-like array around the lens to decides the aperture. This is what camerapedia.org has to say about selenium meters:
“The electric parts of such a meter are an electromagnetic measuring instrument which is connected to anode and cathode of a selenium photo cell that produces more or less electric power when exposed to more or less light. The optical part of such a meter is a window in front of the photo cell’s light sensitive side. The window’s surface is usually structured like a honeycomb made of convex lenses. This type of window helps to bundle the light coming from the direction to where the photo cell is directed. The mechanical part of a selenium meter is an analog calculator which accepts exposure value and film speed as input parameters for showing the possible aperture/shutter speed combinations for correct exposure.”
I find this all so fascinating! It’s so cool to find almost 50 year old technology that still functions today without batteries. And my new camera definitely still functions. When I set it to auto and try to take a picture in a dark room, it flashes a little orange gel in the viewfinder and it won’t snap a picture. Definitely an outside point-and-shoot. I can’t wait to shoot a roll!